| Many legal issues are related to linguistic theories. It is said that the discipline of law actually is a course of Forensic Linguistics. The development of cross-disciplinary research on language and the study of law itself give birth to the new discipline of Forensic Linguistics. Linguistic theories of semantics and pragmatics such as Discourse Analysis and Speech Act Theory are applied to analyze various aspects of legal language, e.g. legal language in written form, spoken form and bilingual form. As a new linguistic discipline, Cognitive Linguistics is based on the cognitive science and explains language through cognitive style and knowledge structure. The theories of Cognitive Linguistics are also applied to legal language studies, e.g. the functional and cognitive study of the legal documents.Based on the data collected in court, from the perspective of metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis analyzed the syntactical structures, classification, features and socio-cultural and forensic bases of the metaphorical concepts in legal language in court. It further explored the metaphorical concepts'cognitive functions and forensic functions in the law system. Through comprehensive analysis, the thesis has drawn the following conclusions:(1) Syntactically, metaphorical expressions appear in legal language generally with the source, the target and the connective present. That is to say, more similes exist in legal language than in other linguistic forms.(2) Semantically, the domains of the source and the target often belong to a same upper one.(3) Compared with other linguistic forms, metaphorical expressions in court often appear in colloquial form. The lawyer, prosecutor and other court attendants tentatively use them. Seen from the perspective of judicial procedures, most of the metaphorical expressions appear in the phases of speech delivering and debate.(4) The features of the legal language cause the differences between metaphorical expressions in court language and other linguistic forms. The legal language represents the society and culture it belongs to, so different social patterns and cultures respectively preserve unique features of the metaphorical expressions in court language. (5) The cognitive functions of the metaphorical concepts in legal language are mainly constructing new concepts, explanation and reasoning.(6) The forensic functions of metaphorical expressions in legal language are popularizing law, reinforcing legal force and enhancing the legal practitioners'professional qualification. |
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